Honestly, I have no idea what's going on anymore. Started everything off in the middle of World War III, brokered some deals for peace, and then by the end of it all, we found ourselves back in the thick of it. Basically, at the beginning of my turns, I started getting geared up to take more of Ramses' cities. I had our research set to 0% for a while and focused on building artillery and pumping out more units. I was a little afraid of Louis, as on the power graph, he was far above us, so I bribed Ragnar into declaring on them as well. Then all of a sudden out of the blue, Stalin declared war on us. I didn't want to fight a two front war, so I made peace with Louis and Ramses, with no concessions from either side. Stalin blindsided us and brought a load of Cossacks right next to London by way of ship. Luckily, we had some units still stationed there, so I did some emergency upgrades and sent all our mobile units north. We were easily able to clear everything out within a matter of turns, so I sent our extra forces to the north west so we could get rid of that city that Stalin had next to all the iron. Ended up conquering and razing it. It would have been a pretty unprofitable city, engulfed within Moscow's borders. It also had a lot of overlap with Moscow's tiles, which I didn't want, since I have plans for owning Moscow in the near future.
Now while all this was going on up north, there was a lot of action to the south. Genghis and Ragnar between the both of them took three of Ramses cities. What this did was free up some of our borders and now, we seem to have access to oil in the southwest. So I hurriedly got a bunch of workers down there to finish an oil well. With oil now in hand, we could finally build some ships to compete with Stalin's frigates. Started and cash rushed a battleship in London. 40 power compared to Stalin's dinky 8 power frigates means domination time. So basically towards the end of my turns, I was gearing up for a rush on Moscow. I have a couple of transports cooking in some of the coastal cities, as well as another battleship. What we need to do now is send our battleships around the coast to clear out Stalin's entire navy. Then we can transport over some tanks next to Moscow.
Oh yeah, by the way, on my last turn Genghis asked us to declare war on Ramses again. I noticed he's now down to a single city, so I obliged. It's now a race to see who can conquer his last city amongst ourselves, Genghis, and Ragnar, so as you can see I sent whatever extra units we had in the south into Ramses' territory. After Ramses is eliminated, we should automatically go to peace with Louis, so don't fear him too much.
As for plans besides military ones, we should probably hit up Rocketry next after Plastics. Three of the computer players already have learned this, which means they all have a jump start on us in the space race. We need to learn this ASAP so we can start on the space elevator.
Started my turns by starting the U.N. build in York. Sometime shortly after, Louis declared war on Ramses and promptly took control of two of his cities. This basically means Ramses is not going to be a contender for the rest of the game. Not to miss out on the land grab, I declared war on Ramses when Louis asked. I tried to assemble our forces to the southeast as quickly as possible and rush built a bunch of trebuchets to try to take over Pi-Ramsses. Unfortunately, one turn before I conquered the city, Ramses capitulated with Louis and is now his vassal! That automatically ends war with us. Now, we're in somewhat of a predicament. The good news is, we are researching at a very fast clip and I think we'll be able to maintain the tech lead from here on out. But with all the war and chaos, the diplomacy goal is now out the window. I guess it's time to gear up for the space race. In order to best do this, here are some things we should probably think about. I think it would be highly beneficial for us to build the Three Gorges Dam to power the continent. The space race is a battle of tech and production, so this wonder would help with the latter greatly. The more immediate concern however is getting hold of some oil. We can't build the best military and naval units without it and living with obsolete units is basically an invitation to get stomped by someone. There are two paths we could take to accomplish this. First, we could try to capture the heart of Stalin's civ, though I think this would be a pain in the ass, considering we'd have to march our army up north through Ragnar's territory to be able to do this (because we have no iron, our navy is inferior to everyone's so we can't ship our ground units by sea). The better option is to declare war on Ramses again, capture Pi-Ramsses, and hope we can expand the borders enough to take that off-shore oil well. The problem with this is Louis will automatically declare war on us in retaliation since Ramses is now his vassal. I think the best option would be to group gangbang Ramses with Genghis. After all the stupid vassal connections take effect, it would essentially be us, Genghis, and Hannibal against Louis and Ramses. Louis has a very strong military right now, so it might be best to sick Genghis on them first to provide a distraction, then sneak in and capture the city, hopefully making peace again ASAP. If you have a different plan in mind, feel free to go ahead. Things might get a little sticky from here.
So I'm really not sure what we should do now. After making peace with Ramses (and getting a nice windfall of cash in the process), I tried to further stabilize things on the home front by reorganizing some tiles and upgrading our military. Made sure to switch back to Universal Suffrage ASAP as well, considering this is the single most important civic for us now. We seriously have the least varied terrain of pretty much any civ I've ever played. It's all plains and grasslands, making our production pretty poor overall. The hammer bonus from Universal Suffrage is really key for us. Tech wise, I switched away from Assembly Line, finished learning Electricity, and started on Radio. While Assembly Line would give us a better military unit, I think we're fairly safe right now. As long as we keep pumping out our current units and continue upgrading, I don't think anyone aside from Ramses or Stalin would declare war on us. Both of those guys are kind of lagging in tech and are not a threat to spring some new fangled military force on us. We're almost to Mass Media, meaning we can probably start building the U.N. during my next set of turns.
The big problem now is I think we group gangbanged Ramses a bit too hard. You'll notice that he is now third in score, just below Genghis by a very small margin. Remember way back in the day when I said Genghis was a great ally because he had a strong military, but had a very low total score and was not a threat in a diplomatic race? Well, Hannibal gave him a giant boost in score when he agreed to become his vassal sometime during your last set of turns. Worst of all, I think Ragnar ended up taking one of Ramses major cities during the last conflict. (During my turn it was us, Genghis, Hannibal, and Ragnar all on Ramses at once.) Things were starting to get a little out of hand so I had to reach into our tech wallet and bribe everyone to chill. Hopefully, this will give Ramses enough breathing room to rebuild his military and start chugging along in tech again. One major concern though...I think the city Ramses lost was Memphis (don't really remember, it flashed on screen only briefly). It hasn't updated this on the map, but I'm not sure if that's only because of "fog of war" or if Ramses somehow regained it. The reason I bring this up is because Memphis was KEY for him. It had The Spiral Minaret and another big wonder that I don't remember right now. If he happened to lose this city, he's toast for sure.
So I'm not really sure what course of action we should take now. Diplomatically, the last war was a bit of a mess for us. We have to somehow get Ramses ahead of Genghis in score again to have a shot at diplomatic victory. I'm thinking it might not be a bad idea to bribe Genghis into a war with Ragnar. They are both very strong militarily, and doing so might preoccupy them with neither gaining a major advantage in the end. Then, we could hope Ramses gets going like he used to. If worst comes to worst, we could gift him a lot of techs somewhere down the road to get his score up, but I'm not sure if we'd take a diplomatic hit from all our allies for "trading with their worst enemy". Also, if you do decide to sick Genghis on Ragnar, we've got to be concerned with the diplomacy hits we're going to take with each of them. Ragnar is going to be a little pissed for bringing in a war buddy against him. And they're both going to be a little miffed that we won't join the war ourselves on either side (declaring on either Genghis or Ragnar would totally kill our diplomacy with one of them permanently). This is a tough call that I'm going to leave totally up to you. The situation is fragile, but I think we still may be able to eek out the diplomatic victory. Otherwise, it's onto Plan B - ramping up our production in preparation for the space race.
